Things in Jars

by Jess Kidd

  *

  Bridie closes the book and stands, looking for Ruby.

  He’s wandered across the chapel-yard and is standing, hat in hand, at his own grave. He bends down and tries to clear the leaves lodged against his headstone. He can’t, of course.

  Then, perhaps hearing Bridie’s footsteps, he turns around.

  His face is sadder than she’s ever seen it.

  ‘I don’t believe that the merrow exist,’ Bridie says, halfway down Highgate Hill. ‘Despite the best efforts of Reverend Winter.’

  ‘Or ghosts?’ smiles Ruby. ‘You don’t believe they exist either, do you?’

  Bridie looks mutinous. ‘To believe merrow exist, and that Christabel is one of them, is to believe she can dabble in a man’s mind, kill him with a fatal bite and drown him standing.’

  ‘She’ll be able to rescue herself, by the sound of it.’

  ‘That’s still my job, Ruby. Only I won’t be returning her to Sir Edmund. Nor will I be leaving her in Dr Harbin’s hands, if he still has her.’

  ‘Do you think they were involved in Ellen Kelly’s murder?’

  ‘I don’t know. But they were the reason Ellen was at Maris House. She was trying to get her child back, or perhaps just be near her. With her hiding in the grounds we know she wasn’t a welcome visitor.’

  ‘God rest her,’ Ruby says. ‘Cut down at no age, left for dead.’

  They walk in silence for a while.

  ‘Will we have a tidy-up around your memorial there?’ she asks gently. ‘A few autumn blooms?’

  ‘Why bother, when I’m hardly there?’ There’s a note to his voice, a mild offence.

  Bridie glances up at him. But all she can see is Highgate, overcast now.

  Chapter 20

  London will turn Atlantis. If the rain keeps falling and the river keeps rising. In some parts the omnibus horses swish pastern-deep in water. The conductors wear galoshes and measure the floods with great officiousness using long sticks (two-foot-deep near Victoria Station, three inches at Walthamstow). In Covent Garden cabbages are yesterday’s news and sea kale is all the rage. For asparagus there’s samphire, for turnips there’s kelp. Before the rain came, the fish had all but vacated the Thames and those that remained were slime-coated, dull of gill and gritty of flesh. Now nets teem and lines hop with the delicious: crayfish and crabs, salmon and trout. Fresh, clear-eyed and succulent!

  Some people, of a morbid, catastrophising sort of disposition, say the floods, which will only worsen, are divine punishment for the orgies of sin that Londoners enjoy. Which is true: there’s plenty of sin to be had in London. The river will keep rising, they say, London will be washed away.

  Mediums report an increase of communications from the drowned. They rise up squelching and inundate séances, imparting wet footprints and the faint smell of sump-water. Incidents of piracy increase tenfold. The London underworld swaps knives for cutlasses and fighting dogs for parrots. Even those with a full complement of eyes take to wearing patches.

  Bridie Devine takes most of this – especially when it’s out of the mouth of Cora Butter – with a barrel full of salt. Knowing London’s propensity for historionics at the slightest change in the weather, she sidesteps the worst of the puddles and concentrates on the task in hand. Which is lurking about Butcher’s Lane, stalking down Paternoster Row and loitering about Amen Corner and Ave Maria Lane. Above her, St Paul’s Cathedral rises – oh, godly high - or at least above the city haze a bit. Immune to Bridie’s street-level plots: a building immutable to the fluctuations of people and weather. Wren’s master-stroke: dome glittering in the watery sunlight that sends the soot particles dancing.

  Now and again Bridie hails a stranger, or coughs fatally, or makes some sudden startling exclamations, then scrutinises the faces of passers-by.

  She is testing her disguise.

  Today, Bridie has traded her skirts for trousers, bodice for a frock coat, bonnet for a top hat. Cora has pinned up her hair and fashioned her a pair of Piccadilly weepers out of an old fur tippet, attaching them to Bridie’s cheeks by means of specially prepared glue.

  The effect is, surprisingly, moderately convincing. But this may have more to do with Bridie’s mannerisms than with the costume itself.

  Ruby, leaning up against a shop doorway, watches her progress with amusement.

  It has been some years since Bridie has donned her gentleman’s disguise. She takes an unpractised turn around a knot of narrow streets, coming back along Little Britain. Soon enough she’s met with blank looks rather than startlement and Bridie remembers how proficient she is. Adept not just with hat, cane and pocket-watch but also with whistling (cheerful, spreeish) and winking (flower sellers, shop girls and costermongers’ mules). She remembers her old walk: a purposeful clip. To this she adds something of Ruby’s swagger, commensurate with her age and experience. And she rejoices again in this old freedom of movement, of legs unencumbered by petticoats and skirts, to stride, hop or long-leap. And those other freedoms – the male’s license to roam – why, he has the key to the city! And with the free-roaming comes the eye unfettered, for (smart new mutton-chop whiskers aside) isn’t it a gentleman’s primary occupation to look rather than be looked at?

  Bridie tips her hat to Ruby and blows a kiss at a charwoman, and grasping the head of her cane sets a course to the viewing gallery in the main operating theatre of Bart’s. She has a front-row ticket.

  Or not quite, for Bridie decided it might be more propitious to stand at the back of the upper tier, knowing, as she does, two things. Firstly, that the hallowed halls of medical learning are open only to men. Secondly, that she could soon come face-to-face with the biggest Antichrist that ever walked the earth. And if she does, she doesn’t want Gideon Eames to recognise her.

  The audience jostle and fidget and exchange medical slanders. They speak in low tones, so that the accumulation of noise in the high-ceilinged, sky-lighted room is that of a buzz, interspersed with coughing and foot shuffling. There is a mordant air of anticipation, an atmosphere of grim excitement. The room is warming up and with it the smell of hair preparation and stale smoke and last night’s alcohol rises. With the increased heat Bridie finds it harder to keep her whiskers on. She presses them to the side of her face, mops her forehead and hopes for the best.

  She sees no one she knows, which is a blessing. If she does, she’ll keep her head down. For now, she is a medical gentleman, like all the rest.

  The patient is laid out and anaesthetised, a process overseen by a doctor with an immaculate apron and rolled-up sleeves. He fastidiously checks and modifies glass bottle, rubber tubing, dials and pumps. Thanks to this blessed giver of sleep the scene before Bridie is a very different one to the first operation she witnessed here.

  September 1846. Standing between Prudhoe and Valentine Rose, same hospital, different theatre. She was no older than fifteen and no younger than . . . who knows. Prudhoe had disguised her as a boy and smuggled her in, no doubt with a bribe or two. Rose joked that she was his new little miscreant brother and she had left a button undone on her waistcoat in a disaffected way. She’d watched as the burly attendants dragged the patient into the room. He was putting up a good fight, the patient, but the audience could see his heart wasn’t in it. To his credit, he was still screaming, but by then it was hoarse and surprisingly rhythmic.

  Prudhoe had turned to her. ‘He has a compound fracture in his right leg. He is buggered entirely.’

  The patient was strapped, sobbing now, to a long wooden bench. The dressers cut off his trousers.

  The surgeon, dour in a stained apron, stalked into the room and was met with a deep hush.

  ‘Compound fracture,’ he demanded. ‘What do we do with a compound fracture?’

  ‘Saw it off, sir,’ a medical gentleman called out.

  ‘Bravo.’ The surgeon selected a straight-backed amputation knife from the table nearby.

  Prudhoe nudged Bridie. ‘He’ll use the tour d’mastre, the knife brought u
p under the knee and round. Then swiftly through the bone with the surgical saw. Not the time to lose heart.’

  ‘Stuck saw, panic sets in,’ parroted Bridie.

  Prudhoe smiled. ‘Surgeon’s panic, not the patient’s. What next?’

  ‘Tie off the arteries and tether the skin flap?’ suggested Rose.

  Prudhoe nodded. ‘All in four minutes, well, three minutes thirty-eight seconds is the best I’ve seen with this fella.’

  ‘There’s a newer method, sir,’ Rose said.

  ‘There are newer surgeons. Wait, though, he’ll go like the clappers . . .’

  The patient thrashed on the table, his eyes protuberating and spittle flying. The assistants, one either side, struggled to keep the man’s shoulders down.

  The surgeon glanced up at an assistant standing next to him with a pocket-watch in his hand. ‘Ready, set, off we bloody well go then.’

  The surgeon’s hands closed around the man’s shattered leg and the patient screamed. Hitting a note of such shrill terror Bridie wanted to run. Instead she put her fingers in her ears. The surgeon felt all along the length of the leg with movements brisk, commonplace and practised.

  The knife was positioned. Bridie and the audience leant forward.

  It was a mercy when the patient passed out.

  ‘He’s a brilliant bugger,’ says the man on Bridie’s left.

  He is a tall, thin fella with prominent teeth, so close that Bridie can feel his breath on her cheek.

  The man on Bridie’s right, red-cheeked, stout and smelling of meat, answers. ‘He’s a genuine genius bastard.’

  The man on her right cocks an eye at Bridie. ‘Don’t know you. First time?’

  ‘In London, it is,’ answers Bridie, in a deeper voice than she meant to use.

  The men glance at each other. Toothy grins. Meaty frowns.

  ‘Irish?’ proposes Meaty.

  ‘You’ve heard of Dr Gideon Eames, Irish?’ enquires Toothy.

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Long time gone,’ answers Meaty. ‘Presumed dead, jaunting about the colonies, Europe, so forth and so on. Learnt trade, inventions and the rest—’

  ‘Gadgets,’ interjects Toothy. ‘Gim-gams.’

  ‘Innovative surgical techniques and apparatus,’ corrects Meaty. ‘World travel, such and such, acquiring knowledge—’

  ‘Paris!’ sniggers Toothy. ‘You’d acquire some knowledge there, eh?’

  Meaty gives Toothy a disparaging glance. ‘Eames has been to every corner of the world.’

  Toothy looks surprised. ‘Has he? I knew he’d visited Copenhagen.’

  ‘Why is he back?’ asks Bridie.

  ‘You missed that part, Irish?’ asks Meaty.

  ‘Must have.’

  ‘He’s finished sowing his oats, simple as that,’ says Toothy.

  ‘There were no oats about it,’ Meaty retorts. ‘Eames was a hunter, a gatherer of medical knowledge.’

  ‘He died a hundred deaths for science!’ exclaims Toothy. ‘Garrotted in the antipodes. Shot by gendarmes in Rouen. Aced in a duel in Vienna.’

  ‘Succumbed to surgeon’s sepsis in Edinburgh,’ adds Meaty, begrudgingly.

  ‘Under the likes of Liston.’

  ‘Lucky to come out of it with a full complement of bollocks, then,’ says Meaty.

  The door opens and a hush immediately falls over the collected gentlemen.

  Dr Gideon Eames walks into the operating theatre.

  Bridie fights the wave of sickness that rises in her.

  He is like the boy she knew and unlike him.

  Tall in stature, wider of waist now and with the broad shoulders of an athlete. His hair, tawny still, is worn unfashionably long, his beard, gold, threaded with grey, is worn fashionably full. He would compete with Ruby for size and swagger. Unlike Ruby, he claims all the space; he takes all the air. Bridie is struggling to find any left to breathe.

  The murmuring voices quieten.

  He looks around the theatre with blue sardonic eyes. Bridie wills him not to see her. Up to the back, passing her by. She keeps her breath held yet.

  He has his sleeves rolled up and a clean apron on.

  ‘Settle down now, piglets.’ His voice is rich, strident. ‘Hands up who wants to watch me spatchcock this patient?’

  The anaesthetist frowns.

  ‘The miracle of anaesthesia, demonstrated by Mr Blake-James here, is such that we can now attempt complicated procedures’ – he whispers, confidentially – ‘involving intestines.’

  The audience laughs.

  His dresser moves the trolley of instruments nearer.

  In the close heat of the room Bridie is dizzy.

  A memory overwhelms.

  As if no time has passed.

  A bright, narrow room in a tottered old cottage, Bridie, small again, holds a bowl of blood and water as big as herself. Her arms will give out, with the fear and with the effort. Gideon, young again, running with sweat, fighting to close the woman he has opened . . .

  ‘Today,’ announces Dr Gideon Eames, ‘we have an inconvenient obstruction; bladder, nothing fancy, but I’m partial to an obstruction.’

  Dr Eames glances at his dresser. ‘If you would kindly lift the patient’s scrotum, Mr Hindle, we shall proceed.’

  As Gideon works he recites medical anecdotes, addressing the room as if they are guests at a dinner party. His tone is warm and comfortable and the medical gentlemen crane their heads, riveted. Gideon alternates between the delicate touch of an artist and the workaday deftness of a blacksmith shoeing a horse.

  Bridie watches with the rest of them, enraptured. Only one member of the audience looks away, the dead pugilist in the back row. He could handle blood in the burn of a fight, of course, but it’s a different matter in the cold light of the operating theatre. Instead, he inspects the benches and pulleys, the instrument cases and the audience, in their tiered rows. Ruby contemplates their various appearances. Some are unkempt and some are ordinary and some fair smudge in dress.

  These are gentlemen who have benefited from every advantage education, application or money can bring. Gentlemen of varying ability and intellect, with forthright, stalwart or just passable characters. Gentlemen eminently fitted to their profession, or here under duress. Gentlemen who have gathered to observe an operation performed by another gentleman and who don’t have to disguise themselves to do so. Ruby turns to Bridie. Her whiskers are crooked, her waistcoat’s too tight and the cut of her trousers is wrong. But then there’s that level green-eyed gaze, chin up, shoulders back, captain of herself. Taking note, calmly, despite the turmoil that must rage inside her, seeing that monstrous bastard again.

  Of this Ruby is sure: nobody belongs here more than Bridie.

  *

  Bridie hangs back as the medical gentlemen file out and the dressers collect the surgical instruments and an assistant mops the floor. She pulls the collar of her coat up and pushes her hat low on her head.

  And then she spots him, over by the operating table, in animated discussion: Curate Cridge from Highgate Chapel. As shabbily dressed today as he was when he was a clergyman, only now Bridie recognises him for what he is: a medical gentleman. He’s not sneering, but he’s still slight, large of head and generally unfavourable-looking. The spurious curate stands with a group of other young reprobates, smoking and gabbing. The burly assistant draws forward to have words. Cridge drops his cigar in a mop bucket, dons his hat and is off out the door.

  Bridie makes haste to follow, pushing through the ambling, babbling rabble. Stopping to stoop to the mop bucket to hook out Cridge’s extinguished cigar. A cheap kind, favoured by medical students: Hussar Blend.

  She hurries out of the theatre; there is no sight of Cridge. She spies him again, in the hall, near the wide oak stairs. In a crush of people, she stops.

  At the open doorway stands Gideon Eames.

  Bridie goes as near as she dares, pressing herself against the wall.

  Gideon is waiting for his carriag
e to be brought round. A crowd surrounds him, men shaking his hand, laughing at his jokes. A young doctor presents his wife; Gideon turns to her with a smile. He kisses her hand, his fingers moving above the cuff of her glove, her face colours and he smiles all the wider.

  Perhaps sensing that he’s being watched, Gideon turns.

  Bridie feels the blood halt in her as their eyes meet, just for an instant. He touches the brim of his hat – and then, distracted by a man’s hand on his arm, he looks away. It is Cridge, there beside him. Gideon pats Cridge on the shoulder with a gesture both dismissive and not without affection.

  People push by, momentarily obscuring Bridie’s view. When the crowds clear again, the men are gone.

  Chapter 21

  The old ship-chandlery shop is the place to go to find something lost and to lose something found under questionable circumstances. The shop slumps in a state of elderly decline along Deptford creek, its windows cobwebbed and dust-crazed. Peer inside and you will see a world of haphazard riches! Ropes so old that Noah himself used them to moor the Ark – they are no more than twists of dust!

  Cracked nautical floats, rowlocks and boathooks, axes and pitch, storm lanterns, moth-mauled mop heads, monkey paws and a thousand other items of net, metal, string and twine. Arcane nautical objects hang from hooks in the ceiling; dusty treasures are stacked in ever-upward-growing piles. The sign on the door is cryptic:

  Open every second TUESDAY of the month

  Excepting when shop is open every third THURSDAY

  Excepting when shop is open alternate MONDAYS

  For board and lodgings enquire within

  For mooring and caulking apply without

  By order of Mr. W. Tackett

  When the door to the shop is open the river breeze (which otherwise prowls the creek aimlessly) takes its chance, rushing in alongside the unwitting customer. The breeze delights most in ringing the bell inside the door – the same bell that rang on board the Flying Dutchman. It resounds morosely, a funereal greeting for the hapless customer. The breeze then turns its attention to the rest of the shop, setting diverse what-nots swinging and rattling, shaking and clanking, toppling and rolling. So that it seems as if the shop itself is suddenly out at sea. Above the shop are the lodging rooms, tenantless now. In the halcyon days when trade was swift, the rooms could be filled ten times over. They took all sorts, saints and sinners; a blind sea captain and a one-armed stevedore, gentleman-paupers by the score and an Irish corpse collector. On fair weather days the inmates would line up outside the shop. Scowling at the sun, spitting at the passers-by.